By dawn the next day, every man who'd come down with "typhoid" was back on his feet. The Blood-Thinning Pills and bacon had worked a little miracle in the eyes of the Granite Hearth Clan—never mind that the pills only whipped a failing body like a tired mule.
Gratitude burned like kindling. The cauldron yard swelled with volunteers, and the men already on rota swung their axes harder, stoked the purple flames higher.
Zaric was among the newly "healed." His recovery was the swiftest of all—mostly a matter of toweling off the water he'd misted onto his face the night before to fake fever-sweat.
He bounced toward the forge-yard at first light, bright as a bell.
The shiftmaster had moved their crew from nights to days. The change suited Zaric fine. Master Yao had stopped demonstrating fresh sequences from the Art of the Earthen Titan; there wasn't much more to steal from the fence line for now. Working the cauldron by day and vanishing to the back mountain by night kept his cultivation clean and quiet.
"Kiddo Yun—ah! Zaric, you're up already? Feeling better?" called the woman from the next courtyard over, basket of willow shavings on her arm. In the clan she was everyone's Auntie Wen; she'd watched Zaric and Lyra Terran grow on thin porridge.
"Totally fine, Auntie Wen! All thanks to Young Master Kael's medicine. Young Master Kael is—truly—a great man!" Zaric beamed, voice pitched to carry. As he trotted along the lane, he made sure half the street overheard how miraculous the pill had been.
"That's good, that's good." Auntie Wen's eyes softened. A twelve-year-old hopping like a spring hare looked silly on a grown soul, but to the village he was exactly that: a boy. Kael had once called him "too old for his years." Boys needed to look like boys sometimes; it soothed suspicion like warm broth.
"My man tried to get on the team to brew that bone-soup thing, but no luck. You're a lucky one, Zaric," Auntie Wen sighed, half envious, half relieved.
"Haha, Auntie Wen, we've a little bacon left from what I got. I'll bring you a piece tonight," Zaric said lightly. He didn't cling to the hard, salty slab the way half the clan did.
In truth, he'd shaved a corner from it and fed the hounds that lived by the warrior cadre's kennels. Hearth dogs were precious; only the cadre kept them. If the meat carried poison—as he suspected—better a dog retch it up than Lyra. The dogs had wagged and begged for more. After that, he'd let Lyra cut paper-thin bits into a stew. The taste was all salt and smoke; months hung under a soot-black roof had turned flesh to wood.
Lyra had tried to reserve it for him; he'd bullied her into tasting a sliver. He, too, ate little and strung what remained from a beam to dry.
He had bigger meals to hunt.
Two months more and the Aurelian Dominion's selection would arrive. With the Yellow Amethyst drinking Oreforce from the Frost Serpent Core, a stale, splintery strip of bacon meant nothing. And Auntie Wen… Lyra had told him how many winters that woman had sent secret handfuls of millet across the fence, how many nights those handfuls kept them breathing.
On Earth, lending a coin was easy; here, giving food was love with teeth.
"Auntie Wen, Xiaoke is growing too. Let her chew it if you won't," he said, naming her daughter, who used to shadow him like a sparrow.
"Bah, you child—" She lifted the basket to hide a smile.
"I'll drop it by tonight!" He didn't wait for protest, only waved and loped on.
In the Patriarch's stone courtyard, Kael Lian traced circles across the flagstones.
His practice robes were a silk weave no loom in the clan could spin—soft as water, light as breath. He drifted slow as a pensioner at dawn, then cut fast as a hunting cat—palms shearing air, eyes pinned to fingertips, arms snaking through invisible gaps. When he finished, he set both hands to his waist and spat a needle of breath. It hissed away without thinning, a thread of aether riding plain air.
Men in the Qi-Gatherer Stage could do that—drink the world and breathe it back with force. Kael had stood in that fifth step of Mortal Blood a year already; the last movements he'd shown Bran Ironhand had glimmered with the surety of a man who knew his reach.
"Magnificent! Peerless!" Bran crowed, clapping until his palms burned. "In two months, at the Dominion trials—Young Master will certainly be named a Kingdom Knight!"
"Less froth," Kael cut him off. "The refinement?"
"Smooth. It must be smooth." Bran thumped his chest. "Those cheap folk got bacon and pills from Young Master and now they'd sleep under the cauldron if I let them."
"Give them some of the ore slurries as well," Kael said idly. The rinse-water left from his own soaks meant nothing to him now. He paused, then asked, "That boy—Zaric. What of him?"
"Zaric…" Bran's lip curled. "Took ill—splitting his guts, sweat like a pig. Whole shack stank. He was a beggar made flesh. If not for your mercy—and the pill—you'd be rid of him. I watched him swallow it with my own eyes. Now he's out praising Young Master around the lanes, saying your medicine saved his life."
A small, amused line touched Kael's mouth. This village of dust-cheap lives—each dumber than the last. He'd worried the brat might have some edge. It appeared he'd given the boy too much credit.
Let them be fools. Fools were easy to herd. Easier still to bury if the earth needed a body.
"Keep watch," he said, the warmth leaving his voice. "The closer we are to the end, the more one slip would cost. If the refinement succeeds, you're rewarded. If anything goes wrong, you will pay with your head."
The last word rang cold as a blade. Bran bobbed like a hooked fish. "Rest easy, Young Master. I'll sleep by the cauldron's leg."
He stormed into the forge-yard, boots loud, face louder. Zaric was there, splitting purple firewood with that unhurried, steady rhythm that never quite matched his age. When their eyes met, Zaric's lashes dipped. Internally, he smiled. An idiot with a stick is just a stick.
"What are you staring at? Work or die!" Bran barked, pitching a burlap sack down. When it spilled open, a wet heap of dark, reeking pulp slumped out, tied with a bundle of cheap adjuncts.
"Ore slurries from Young Master's soaks," Bran announced. "Supplement packs are in there. Take them home, boil them hard, and get in while it's hot. It'll do you good. Damn it, you trash have it easy."
The men's eyes lit like lamps. They surged, jostled, and grabbed. A reward was a reward—even if it was water that had already run off Kael's skin.
Zaric strode forward with the others because he had to, made a token reach, and let the prize slip from his fingers with a sigh. Even if a sack fell into his hands, he'd have tossed it. Soak in Kael Lian's bathwater? He'd rather chew bark.
Bran admired his own reflection in their gratitude and, seeing Zaric slow and "dim," allowed himself a snort. This one couldn't even push to the front for scraps. What else could he do? Let him starve.
He strutted out. The men went back to work. Under the Li Fire Water's high boil, the Frost Serpent Core bled its essence into solution; then the long evaporate began, lick by lick, until crystals would rim the bronze like frost on eaves.
Li Fire Water didn't boil off like a kettle. It ate wood and hours, and the heat scalded skin to a steady red.
Everyone's skin—except Zaric's. His cheeks glowed, but not with fire. His color came from inside, from the steady flood of Oreforce the Yellow Amethyst strained and poured into marrow. Fed like that, his flesh wore a soft, healthy pink.
He watched Bran's back shrink to a speck and glanced at the cauldron's lip. The appetite in his bones stretched and purred. He'd eaten well again. The mountain would hear about it tonight.
Full belly, full veins—his hands ached to speak.